Deep Learning Analysis of COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy and Confidence Expressed on Twitter in 6 High-Income Countries: Longitudinal Observational Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: An ongoing monitoring of national and subnational trajectory of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy could offer support in designing tailored policies on improving vaccine uptake. OBJECTIVE: We aim to track the temporal and spatial distribution of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and confidence expressed on Twitter during the entire pandemic period in major English-speaking countries. METHODS: We collected 5,257,385 English-language tweets regarding COVID-19 vaccination between January 1, 2020, and June 30, 2022, in 6 countries-the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Ireland. Transformer-based deep learning models were developed to classify each tweet as intent to accept or reject COVID-19 vaccination and the belief that COVID-19 vaccine is effective or unsafe. Sociodemographic factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and confidence in the United States were analyzed using bivariate and multivariable linear regressions. RESULTS: The 6 countries experienced similar evolving trends of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and confidence. On average, the prevalence of intent to accept COVID-19 vaccination decreased from 71.38% of 44,944 tweets in March 2020 to 34.85% of 48,167 tweets in June 2022 with fluctuations. The prevalence of believing COVID-19 vaccines to be unsafe continuously rose by 7.49 times from March 2020 (2.84% of 44,944 tweets) to June 2022 (21.27% of 48,167 tweets). COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and confidence varied by country, vaccine manufacturer, and states within a country. The democrat party and higher vaccine confidence were significantly associated with lower vaccine hesitancy across US states. CONCLUSIONS: COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and confidence evolved and were influenced by the development of vaccines and viruses during the pandemic. Large-scale self-generated discourses on social media and deep learning models provide a cost-efficient approach to monitoring routine vaccine hesitancy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".